A place for us to share with the world what goes on here - warts and all, and to fantasize about someday really understanding what it means to be "self-sufficient"...

Saturday, March 03, 2007

Tapped

Finally, the maple season is here! We tapped about half the trees today. We didn't get home until late, so the others will have to wait until tomorrow. But it hit the requisite 40 degrees today, and every tap flowed instantly when I drilled it.

Some trees, like this big maple, still get the traditional taps and buckets. The gentle "ping, ping" as the sap hits the bottom is very satisfying. But we live on a mountainside, and several of the maples are so hard to get to with buckets, we've gone to plastic tubing and a collection tub. We're shooting for 25 taps this season. That requires tapping a few new trees that we discovered on the fringes of the property this last Fall. Twelve taps so far in 6 trees. This also means a visit to the kitchen supply store Monday for a pan for the fire, and ordering a few more taps and filters, and finding the sledge and wedge for fire-building, and getting on-line to order bottles and jugs, and still looking for the perfect digital thermometer...

2 comments:

Well, sorry to disappoint on the Maine accent...being that we're from upstate NY, we don't have any accents at all! (*grin*)

There's a rhythym to the seasons, as I'm sure you know, and tapping is the official "beginning" of our farm year. Most of it goes to our daughter's pancake obsession, but this next year I want to turn a lot more of it into recipes/cooking. I even have a batch of maple wine setting up right now from last year's stock....